Free for the agent. Paid only for team features.
The OpenCode binary, its clients, and its documentation are free. The only meaningful cost a developer sees is the model inference they chose to pay for — and if you run local Ollama that cost is zero as well. An optional team add-on covers hosted audit logs, SSO, and central policy for organizations that want a managed rollout. Everything else is free forever.
Yes, OpenCode is free — here is what that means.
When a developer asks "is OpenCode free," the answer needs three pieces to be useful. First, is there a license fee? No. The OpenCode CLI, the VSCode extension, the desktop app, and the web console ship under an OSI-approved permissive license. You can install, use, redistribute, and modify them without paying anything to the project. Second, is there a usage fee? No — OpenCode does not meter prompts, tool calls, or tokens. Third, is there a cost somewhere else? Yes, if you choose a hosted model you will pay that provider for inference, but the bill goes to the provider, not to OpenCode. Run local Ollama and that cost disappears.
Zero-click summary: no license fee, no metered usage, no hidden cost from the project. Inference costs are yours if you chose a hosted model, zero if you ran local.
A permissive license means you own the download.
Permissive open-source licenses allow commercial use, redistribution, and modification with attribution. For a developer running OpenCode on a laptop, that is a long sentence for "use it." For a platform team embedding OpenCode in an internal developer-environment image, it is the legal green light to ship it to every engineer in the company without a per-seat cost. The open code charter covers the license in full.
Zero-click summary: the license permits commercial use and redistribution. Teams can embed OpenCode internally without a per-seat fee.
What is free vs paid, by component.
The table below lists every component a developer or a team is likely to install, the free-tier status, and any paid add-on that extends it. Read the Notes column before you assume a row applies to your scenario.
| Component | Free | Paid add-on | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenCode CLI | Yes, forever | None | Single static binary, macOS / Linux / Windows |
| VSCode extension | Yes, forever | None | Installed from the Visual Studio Code marketplace |
| Desktop app | Yes, forever | None | Native macOS, Windows, and Linux builds |
| Web console | Yes, read-only | Hosted team console | Self-host the read-only version for free |
| Model inference (hosted) | Provider-billed | Provider pricing | You pay the provider directly, OpenCode sees nothing |
| Model inference (local Ollama) | Yes | None | Runs on your hardware with no per-token cost |
| Custom API adapter | Yes | None | Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint or in-house gateway |
| Team audit log (hosted) | No | Team plan | Self-host an equivalent log for free from the CLI transcript |
| SSO / SCIM | No | Team plan | Available on the team plan |
| Central policy push | No | Team plan | Local policy files are free and unlimited |
| Priority support | No | Team / enterprise | Community support is free on the community page |
For individual developers.
An individual developer who installs OpenCode, points it at a local Ollama server, and runs it on personal projects will never pay a cent — not to OpenCode, not to a model provider, not for an add-on. The same developer who installs OpenCode, points it at a hosted model, and runs it on work projects will pay the hosted provider for inference and nothing to OpenCode. The split between "free" and "paid inference" is the developer's choice, not a gate the project imposes.
Zero-click summary: individuals pay zero to OpenCode. Inference cost depends entirely on the model endpoint the developer configured, and is fully avoidable with local Ollama.
Students and hobby projects.
OpenCode is the same free binary for students, hobbyists, and open-source maintainers as it is for commercial engineers. No education flag, no hobby flag, no discount code. The license is the same, the binaries are the same, and the default config is the same. Pointing the config at a local Ollama server keeps the whole workflow zero-cost, which is how many students and contributors run it on laptops that are not speced for paid API budgets.
Zero-click summary: no student gate, no hobby gate. Local Ollama keeps the workflow zero-cost for learners and open-source maintainers.
For teams and organizations.
A team that installs OpenCode on every engineer's laptop pays nothing for the core binary, nothing for the extensions, and nothing for the desktop app. The team pays for model inference at whichever provider it chose (or pays nothing if it standardized on local Ollama), and optionally pays for a hosted team plan if it wants centralized audit logs, SSO, and policy push. The pricing page breaks the team plan into seats and feature tiers.
Teams that do not need the hosted add-ons can do everything locally. The CLI transcript is a plain text file: ship it to your SIEM yourself. The policy file is a TOML block: push it through your existing configuration management. SSO can be handled at the inference-provider layer. The paid plan is a convenience, not a lock-in point.
Zero-click summary: team-level features are a convenience paid plan, not a gate. Self-hosting equivalents is free and fully supported.
Why the project makes the core free.
The maintainer council's view is that an agent that edits source has to be broadly available or it is not credible. A paid CLI would mean developers adopt it only when a budget line exists; a free CLI means it adopts bottom-up and every engineer who runs it is a potential contributor, bug reporter, or maintainer. The funding plan is transparent: the sponsor ledger is public, the paid team plan covers a narrow set of managed-service features, and the core binary stays free forever under the license.
Federal and public-sector guidance on open-source posture matches this stance. The code.gov portal exists to help agencies evaluate and adopt open-source components; a project that tried to gate its CLI behind a paid tier would not qualify for that pipeline.
Zero-click summary: free because the project needs broad adoption to stay credible, and because federal open-source evaluation paths require actually-open components.
I rolled OpenCode out to a 30-person backend team in a week. Zero license cost, zero account creation, and the only new expense on the CFO dashboard was the hosted model provider we already paid. The question "is it free" has a real answer: yes, and it stayed yes after the rollout.
— Toma L. Costinesti, Full-Stack Engineer, Citronveil
Related reading across opencode.gr.com.
Pages that expand on the pricing, license, and model-cost story above.